Optimizing Vue.js Apps for Speed and Performance

Performance is an essential consideration in modern web applications; your users expect your applications to load quickly, allow for fluid interactions, and respond immediately. Vue.js is a reactive, lightweight framework that gives developers many tools to create performant applications. Then, as your application increases in complexity, you may run into performance issues.

In this blog, we will outline tested techniques and best practices to help you optimize your Vue.js apps to improve speed and performance and provide fast user experiences.

1. Optimize Bundle Size

Large bundle sizes can considerably increase application load times. Larger JavaScript bundles require users to download a larger amount of code to their browser for parsing.

Ways to reduce bundle size:

• Apply dynamic imports to lazy load routes and components.
• Avoid import entire libraries, and instead, import only functions to your components.
• Use a bundle analyzer like webpack-bundle-analyzer, or vite-bundle-visualizer to determine where dependencies are too large.
• Enable tree-shaking to remove unused code while performing builds.

2. To Implement Lazy Loading

Lazy loading loads components and routes only when needed instead of loading everything when the app first starts. This decreases bundle size and improves time-to-interactive.

Possible use case:
Load components or routes as users navigate to them instead of preloading in a large app with many views.

3. Reactivity in Vue

Vue’s reactivity system is great, but overuse of reactive data can lead to unnecessary rendering.

Tips for optimizations:

• Keep your state and data minimal and scope it only to what you need.
• Prefer computed properties over watchers when possible.
• eliminate deep watchers if possible.

4. Optimize your images and assets

Images tend to bring in the most loading time on the page, so let’s optimize them to improve performance.

Tips:

• Utilize modern formats – WebP or AVIF.
• Consider a lazy load on images below the fold.
• Compress large assets before shipping.
• Use a CDN to deliver static files faster.

5. Use Code Splitting and Asynchronous Components

Vue 3 can utilize asynchronous components, meaning parts of your app will only load when necessary.

Benefits:

• Reduces initial load time in your app.
• Enhances perceived performance.
• Enhances the scalability of your app.

6. Use Server Side Rendering (SSR) or Static Site Generation (SSG)

SSR (using Nuxt.js) or SSG can greatly improve app performance through server-side pre-rendering of pages. This means your app will spend less time rendering on the client side, and can even improve SEO.

Benefits:

• Quicker first paint and time-to-interactive.
• Helpful for SEO and web crawlers.
• Less client-side JavaScript execution.

7. Smart Caching

Caching is useful for avoiding repeat data fetching and re-accelerating frequently requested data fetching.

Best Practices:

• Where applicable, cache API responses.
• Use localStorage or IndexedDb for persistent caching.
• Use browser caching headers for static assets.

8. Optimize State Management

Improper state management will degrade the performance of your Vue.js application – especially if you are using a global store (like Vuex or Pinia) inefficiently.

Suggestions:

• Do not store data unnecessarily in a global store.
• Use local UI component state for component-specific state.
• Large stores should be split into modules for application or state improvement.

9. Reduce Size and Compress Files

• Before deploying your app, be sure to minify and compress the JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files.
• Tools to do this could be Terser, UglifyJS, or complete build optimization built into Vite.
• Additionally, you should enable Gzip or Brotli compression if you haven’t already to deliver smaller files to the user in their browser.

10. Measure Site Performance and Test.

Finally, you should always measure and monitor the site’s performance periodically to look for bottlenecks and see if there have been any improvements.

Some tools would be:

• Lighthouse (that comes built into Chrome DevTools)
• WebPageTest or GTmetrix
• Vue DevTools for runtime performance tracking.

Conclusion

Optimizing Vue.js apps is not just to make sure that the application loads faster, it is about a better overall user experience.
If you use these best practices and optimize their code appropriately, (code splitting, caching, SSR, deferred loading), then you can achieve a low-weight vue.js app that performs better, scales better, and becomes a better user experience.

A performant vue.js app is better for users, better for SEO, and increases conversion (among other things), which is why optimizing performance has become a key component of building a modern frontend application.
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